Listening in Double Time: Temporal Disunity and Structural Unity in the Music of John Coltrane 1965-67
Marc Howard Medwin
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Music.
Chapel Hill 2008
Approved by:
David Garcia
Allen Anderson
Mark Katz
Philip Vandermeer
Stefan Litwin
©2008
Marc Howard Medwin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT
MARC MEDWIN: Listening in Double Time: Temporal Disunity and Structural Unity in the Music of John Coltrane 1965-67
(Under the direction of David F. Garcia).
The music of John Coltrane’s last group—his 1965-67 quintet—has been
misrepresented, ignored and reviled by critics, scholars and fans, primarily because it is a music built on a fundamental and very audible disunity that renders a new kind of structural unity. Many of those who study Coltrane’s music have thus far attempted to approach all elements in his last works comparatively, using harmonic and melodic models as is customary regarding more conventional jazz structures. This approach is incomplete and misleading, given the music’s conceptual underpinnings. The present study is meant to provide an analytical model with which listeners and scholars might come to terms with this music’s more radical elements.
I use Coltrane’s own observations concerning his final music, Jonathan Kramer’s temporal perception theory, and Evan Parker’s perspectives on atomism and laminarity in mid 1960s British improvised music to analyze and contextualize the symbiotically related temporal disunity and resultant structural unity that typify Coltrane’s 1965-67 works. I also filter all of this through my experience as a listener. My investigation treats, separately, Coltrane’s solos of the period 1965-1967 as well as temporal and structural complexities in Coltrane’s deployment and expansion of a jazz rhythm section; I then demonstrate, based on new historical research, the manifestation of similar but hitherto unexplored modes of
expression in today’s jazz and classical avant-garde as a way to begin to gauge Coltrane’s long-term impact on improvised music that exists outside the “jazz” canon.
In Chapter 1, I present my bipartite analytical model of soloistic atomism and rhythm section laminarity, relating these to Kramer’s concepts of multiply-directed linear and
vertical time respectively. I then explore Coltrane’s own words concerning his final music and regarding unity and disunity as he conceived them. Chapter 2 constitutes an examination of atomism in Coltrane’s solos, in which I demonstrate that atomistic features increase in Coltrane’s late works; this soloistic atomism is one component of my analytical model.
Chapter 3 explores rhythm section laminarity, demonstrating the abandonment of tempo and pulse in favor of a more minimal aesthetic. Chapter 4 is devoted to a study of the way in which the innovative structural principals in Coltrane’s final works are used by improvising composers Anthony Braxton and Paul Dunmall. As with Coltrane, both artists’ compositions blur the boundaries between jazz and classical music, their work representing two
transgenerational approaches to Coltrane’s legacy.
The sound examples in chapters 1, 3 and 4 can be found attached as accompanying wave files.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION……….1
Chapter I. ANTECEDENT Introduction………27
Evan Parker, Jonathan Kramer, Time, and the Atomism/Laminarity Dichotomy……… ……30
Coltrane’s Conception of Unity through Diversity………...42
II. SOLOISTIC ATOMISM Introduction………52
Coltrane’s Atomism………...53
Atomism in Coltrane’s Apprenticeship………...56
Atomism under Miles’ Tutelage………58
Atomism in Coltrane’s Compositions 1957-65………...65
1965: Transition and Discontinuity………...70
Saxophone Influences on Late Coltrane………73
Atomism in Coltrane’s Late Solos………...75
III. RYHTHM SECTION LAMINARITY
Introduction………86
External Musical Influences………..87
The Classic Quartet………95
1965: The Classic Quartet’s Disillusion………..100
The Final Works………..106
Immediate Influence………121
IV. COLTRANE’S LEGACY Introduction………..125
Anthony Braxton………..127
Paul Dunmall………...143
CONCLUSION……….161
APPENDIX A………...167
APPENDIX B………178
DISCOGRAPHY………...182
BIBLIOGRAPHY………..185
INTRODUCTION
“You can go into that later. But I think it’d be better if we keep it pressing, so just keep a thing happening all through …” said John Coltrane to pianist McCoy Tyner in one of the rare instances of studio chatter associated with what would come to be known as the Classic quartet.1 August 1965, during which this pithy fragment and the accompanying Sunship sessions were recorded, saw the quartet of Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones in its fourth year, a considerably long time for any jazz group to be in existence. Consequent to the largely improvisational nature of the
Sunship sessions, verbal communication was necessary only to outline the bare essentials of any given musical structure, the details coming to continuously altered fruition in each performance. Jointly, the heads, or melodies, that Coltrane was bringing to these summer 1965 sessions, whether his own or not, were as sparse, fragmentary and tantalizingly
suggestive but elusive as the above quotation. The musical idea that forms the issued take of
“Dearly Beloved” seems to begin midstream, Tyner assenting readily and immediately to Coltrane’s all but unspecified instructions as the saxophonist emotes over the steady layers of sound emitted by the rhythm section.
This dissertation examines the above quotation’s implications for Coltrane’s music over the succeeding two years. It examines Coltrane’s radical approach to the soloist/rhythm section hierarchy associated with a conventional jazz quintet. However, the final quintet’s music seems purposefully disunified where rhythm, mode and meter are concerned. The two
1John Coltrane, The Classic Quartet: Complete Impulse Studio Recordings (Impulse! IMPD8-280, 1998).
elements, soloist and rhythm section, will be examined separately to demonstrate Coltrane’s innovative approach to rhythm section deployment and how it serves as a contrast to his soloistic language.
The “thing happening all through,” from the above quotation, is vital, a key element in the music to issue from Coltrane’s prolific group sessions and concerts over the next two years. “Dearly Beloved” — the Sunship track under discussion here, seems to follow through on Coltrane’s wishes, initially presenting a full-sonoritied quasi-modal soundscape that is diverse on a fundamental structural level; it is one of those that begins a trend of music that exists somewhere between meterlessness and polyrhythm. In other words, temporal concerns demonstrate a new degree of multileveled elasticity as would befit late Coltrane’s trademark aesthetic. While Tyner’s multifarious figurations on “Dearly Beloved” will be discussed in Chapter 3, it should be noted here that Coltrane’s instruction opens the distinct possibility that some planning on his part, even if momentary, was an integral component of the emergent group sound; inherent in the quotation is a plan for a soloist/group dialectic which would itself serve to establish a new kind of structure in a music that was based
increasingly on a unique combination of interpersonal freedom supporting, and supported by, the underlying jazz convention of the soloist/group relationship.
While it will never be possible to know the full scope of Coltrane’s compositional intentions, a purposeful and structural disunity seems to be at the heart of his compositional aesthetic of 1965-1967. The present study traces one path through the many complexities in Coltrane’s final works, examining temporal disunity and structure resulting from the
disconnect between Coltrane’s soloing and his rhythm section’s simultaneous activity.
Examined separately, Coltrane’s soloing and rhythm section deployment are revealed to be
some of the most radical of the period, necessitating a much different analytical approach than has been afforded by jazz scholarship.
Coltrane was not among the very first-wave inventors of free jazz, a New York-based group that included Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman. Yet, Coltrane’s innovative approach to soloing beginning around 1955 influenced these musicians to rethink the potential of the soloist in group context. Indeed, Shepp states that Coltrane was among his primary influences.2 Similarly, these musicians would ultimately impact
Coltrane’s eventual diversion from conventional approaches to tonality, meter, and to the very fabric of the stereotypical jazz group itself. Far from being a clone or simply a follower however, Coltrane maintained a dogged refusal to adopt wholesale any other musician’s approach over his own long-cherished vision. Ekkehard Jost makes a brilliant case for the reciprocal nature of Coltrane’s relationship with this group of free-thinking artists, whose careers he went to great lengths to foster; their contributions to his last works can not be overestimated.3 However, his “free” music sounds very little like the work of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whom he revered,4 and the most demonstrable relations to saxophonist Albert Ayler’s music are found in Coltrane’s increasingly thick vibrato and the increasing intensity of his group aesthetic, as will be discussed, respectively, in the second and third chapters. What I hope to portray is a man whose singular approach to his instrument predated and yet encompassed what came to be called the “New Thing” or the “New Black
2Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (Graz, Austria: Universal Edition, 1974; reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), p. 107.
3See Jost, ibid., pp. 84-85.
4Coltrane recorded many of Coleman’s compositions in 1960, accompanied by Coleman’s sidemen; see Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder, 1998), p. 266.
Music.”5
As is well known to even the most casual observer and fan, Coltrane was following what he labeled a spiritual path dating back to an elusive but undeniably powerful spiritual awakening or revelation in 1957, one whose hold on him increased as the years passed; this will be discussed in Chapter 1. Spirituality eventually dictated every aspect of the works from his final period, especially, as we shall see, the compositional titles. An instructive comparison would be with Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), another composer whose mystic visions manifested themselves in music that strayed ever further, despite academic titles to his final piano works, from conventional form and tonality. In Scriabin’s youthfully Chopinesque compositions, we hear, in hindsight, early use of tritone substitutions and tonal vagaries; these seeming aberrations would ultimately be transformed and give way to the all-encompassing mystic chord, a construct that pervaded many of his final pieces. The mystic chord was a musical representation of Scriabin’s passionate obsession with theosophical concerns, a consciously unifying manifestation of a focused vision, given the evidence of his obsession with it, that straddled the line between radicality and lunacy.6 Coltrane was not, as far as we know, in the habit of articulating his thoughts with anything approaching Scriabin’s frequency and vehemence. However, like Scriabin, he unified his late works with musical quotations and the verticality of the rhythm section sound (see Chapter 3), all to represent more completely his vision of the spiritual world.
At the same time he weighed his musical choices against the expectations of the jazz industry which often resulted in an artistic struggle that can be traced, via his recorded output,
5For the term “New Black Music,” see Kofsky, ibid., p.431.
6For a fascinating discussion of the mystic chord and its multivalent and indeed multi-colored implications, see Faubian Bowers, Scriabin: A Biography (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996), pp. 203-205.
throughout his career. He proved himself over and over to be a player rooted in jazz and popular music traditions, mastering bebop, post-bop, early R and B and ballad style to great effect and in the employ of many of the best players of his time. Yet, there was always a degree of critical confusion about his playing, from the moment he joined Miles Davis’ first quintet in 1955.7 The reasons for this treatment, ranging from non-acceptance to grudging admiration, can be traced to the motivic, harmonic and rhythmic developments that formed his style of soloing, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now that Coltrane’s constant search for new forms of expression did not win the hearts of a largely conservative listening public until those innovations themselves were adopted by many mainstream jazz musicians of the early 1960s. Indeed, his national and international acceptance, especially after the surprise 1960 hit “My Favorite Things,” would go far in explaining the consternation with which his forays into “free” music were met in many public and critical circles.8
An elucidation of Coltrane’s approach to musical “freedom” is entirely impossible to gauge without a cursory examination of his reactions to public/critical perspective, as he was intimately and often painfully aware of such concerns. It might be useful to envision
Coltrane’s approach to what would be defined as free jazz as a series of increasingly incautious encroachments and contemplative retreats, one stylistic trope or easily
categorizable technique always abandoned or assimilated in short order. In 1960, Coltrane gave an interview in Stockholm in which he describes a series of harmonic devices that he
7See George Avakian’s fascinating comments in Carl Woideck, Coltrane Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), p. 217.
8See Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; reprinted by New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p.176.
uses while soloing to take him away from any pre-established chord changes.9 He might have been referring to the now-infamous phrase “sheets of Sound,”10 his three-chord-on-one approach to scalar soloing, or to devices that he employed after the abandonment of such a stereotypically arpeggiated approach to soloing. The fact that he was then at the end of a tour promoting Miles Davis’ classic modal album Kind of Blue probably helped Coltrane to expand his soloistic palette and to gain the fresh insight and perspective on his playing that is so evident in the interview. The following year and a half, culminating in the Village
Vanguard concerts of November 1961, found Coltrane away from the protection of Davis’
employ and fronting his own groups, as he would do from then until his death. It was a time of increased experimentation, both in terms of group instrumentation and regarding the material Coltrane would compose and perform. His groups ranged in size from a quartet to a big band, sometimes employing an extra bassist or wind player in smaller combinations. The equally infamous and currently revered Village Vanguard concerts of November 1961
presented these tendencies in stark distillation, as the group sound, soloing and compositional forms changed from night to night. Often, forms were abandoned for long stretches of time in favor of what might be described as high-volume high-energy “free” blowing, and while the underlying rhythm, or drumwork, was still in the post-bop “swinging” tradition, there was a breathless experimentation throughout the proceedings that can not be easily explained or
9See the Coltrane interview with Carl-Erik Lindgren from Miles Davis: In Stockholm 1960 Complete (Dragon Records, DRCD 228, 1992).
10This term was first coined by Ira Gitler in October 1958 issue of Downbeat. In retrospect, it seems to be an attempt, by a bemused critic, to come to terms with a nascent form of what I will call “atomistic linearity,”
about which more will be said later. The arpeggios inherent to the sheets of sound are in fact crystallizations of harmonic moments, far from the means-to-ends chromatic linearity of bebop rhetoric. The fundamental difficulty was not that Coltrane could not play over any given changes, as held by critical opinion of the day, but that a new harmonic and temporal soloistic language was being crafted, possibly even without Coltrane’s absolute awareness. See Woideck, op. cit., p. 5.
categorized. The new compositions recorded on these evenings might be seen as the furthest logical extension of modality, or as a conscious deconstruction of traditional jazz forms, and these tropes will be discussed more fully in succeeding chapters.
Critical response to these experiments was increasingly hostile, even causing Coltrane and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy to publish an answer in Downbeat.11 It has long been conjectured and debated that Coltrane’s more conservative 1962 albums for the newly
formed Impulse! label resulted from the critical attacks.12 Despite these concessions, seminal works such as “Alabama” and “After the Rain,” both recorded in 1963, demonstrated a new metric freedom, even abandonment, which far exceeds anything from the Vanguard concerts.
If any meter exists in these tracks — debatable from moment to moment — it is certainly non-traditional and eventually disappears altogether in favor of a soloist-lead dialogue in which group interaction supports the soloist while perpetuating a fresh take on collective improvisation. These events prefigure the developments of “Psalm,” the final movement of A Love Supreme (1964), in which, as Lewis Porter has made clear, a poetic text by Coltrane
is the driving compositional force.13
The long-term success of A Love Supreme probably stems, in large part, from the fact that the music itself is never overly confrontational, in keeping with much of the stylistically solid but ultimately palatable 1962 recordings. True, the form is novel and the playing
11See “John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy Answer the Jazz Critics,” from Woideck, ibid., p. 108.
12These albums include Ballads, Coltrane and the collaborations with singer Johnny Hartman and Duke Ellington. It is a strange period in Coltrane’s biography, and he himself is unclear, even contradictory,
concerning his musical ventures of the period. On the one hand, he is indignant about his treatment at the hands of established critics. On the other, he blames his radical shift in musical direction on a malfunctioning
mouthpiece caused by his desire to alter it. Recently rediscovered interview fragments, with Michiel de Ruyter, have served only to add additional layers of confusion to the problem, re-enforcing the reed scenario.
13See Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 244.
suffused with energy, and Coltrane would return several times to the suite as a viable formal option, but the music on A Love Supreme is an extension of modal practice and extended instrumentational and rhythmic techniques, without the “free” components of the Vanguard sessions. However, A Love Supreme’s unqualified success may have allowed Coltrane to pursue experimental tendencies that had become dormant, which he proceeded to do over the next two and a half years. The music gained tremendously in intensity and in energy, and as we will see in Chapter 3, melody and conventional harmony again became blurred.
Even given Coltrane’s growing acceptance and iconic status, by 1967, audiences were once again becoming less tolerant of his chosen modes of expression, and the posthumously released Stellar Regions, along with “To Be” from Expression, demonstrates that a quieter more traditionally contemplative musical language might have been in the offing. Far from refuting or denying Coltrane’s “free jazz” credentials, however, these reductions in volume, if not in intensity, allow for a fresh perspective on what otherwise might be considered extremely difficult music.
Coltrane’s apparent desire to maintain a level of audience acceptance and the musical communication it entails assures a dialectic between tradition and innovation, the results in turn demanding new modes of examination and interpretation. To that end Coltrane’s recordings have been revelatory where my own work is concerned.14 My methodological approach derives, first and foremost, from my experience with the music as a recorded document. Years of listening to the Coltrane material in circulation have led me to my
14In this study, I use recordings strictly as a documentary representation of the group sound Coltrane would have sought in any performative situation. Unlike the late 1960s music of Miles Davis, producer and engineer intrusion is kept to a minimum in Coltrane’s work. Therefore, as important as Rudy van Gelder’s role in capturing the Classic Quartet’s sound might have been, the process of recording and mixing itself, interesting as inquiries of this nature may be regarding other musics, is not discussed here. Even the strange mis-assemblage of “Alabama,” comprising two takes that were not meant to go together, is beyond the scope of this study.
understanding and presentation of his final works. This has involved a study of his complete discography, both as leader and as sideman. Furthermore, and more importantly, I have had access to many hours of unreleased material, in the form of radio and television broadcasts, rehearsal fragments and audience recordings of club and concert performances. As with composers’ sketches in the Western European art music tradition, these unreleased recordings document Coltrane’s developing compositional method in ways that the commercially-released recordings do not. Exploration of such sources is absolutely mandatory for the interested scholar, as Coltrane’s later work is still in need of what Jost fittingly labels a style portrait.15 In the introduction to his indispensable book on free jazz, he explains that to understand this music beyond a superficial level, it is necessary to compile a series of particulars before beginning to attempt a stylistic overview. As I have encountered no book-length studies of late Coltrane, I am attempting a style portrait, one based on my experience as a listener and analyst.
To that end, and to supplement my analysis and interpretation of Coltrane’s
recordings, I engaged in many hours of conversations, most of them informal, with several of Coltrane’s associates, including Amiri Baraka, Rashied Ali, Cecil Taylor, John Tchikai and Bill Dixon. These musicians enabled me to understand and contextualize the broader philosophical and performative elements in play at the time these recordings were made, enabling me to reassess Coltrane’s late style in light of how it was viewed by those artists that formed the circles in which he traveled.
It is the aim of this study to present an analytical model that will enable interested listeners to approach the music in a way befitting it’s innovative and non-conventional structure. The secondary literature I chose to frame my analysis, taken equally from scholars
15Jost, op. cit., p. 10.
and performers, resonated with me because of my reactions to the recordings themselves rather than the literature shaping my initial understanding of the music. Drawing on several theoretical sources, collated from both within and external to the hugely diverse corpus known as improvised music, my goal is to recontextualize, through analysis, the various elements that form the narrative structure at the heart of the aforementioned dialectic, as it is manifested in Coltrane’s final works.
My analytical model comprises three elements; I have drawn upon music theorist Jonathan Kramer’s writings concerning the temporal perception of music, most notably his ideas concerning multiply-directed linear time and vertical time. I combine these constructs with a similar dichotomy in British saxophonist Evan Parker’s writing about 1960s British improvisation. In discussing the stylistic differences between the groups AMM and Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Parker invokes the dichotomy of atomism and laminarity, which I believe to be analogous to Kramer’s two perceptual concepts; more will be
forthcoming concerning both constructs in Chapter 1. Suffice it to say, for now, that Kramer and Parker complement each other in that they are speaking of similar listener-perceived phenomena from both the theorist‘s and performer’s perspective, from the Western art music tradition (Kramer) and the improvised music tradition (Parker).
I have filtered these constructs through my experience as a listener, the third component of my analytical model, and I have found that precisely the disunity described by both Kramer and Parker is evident in the music of Coltrane’s final period.
By “final period” or “late works,” I am referring to the material that Coltrane
recorded between May of 1965 and April of 1967. While earlier material will be explored in this study, it is only to provide context and some continuity for the superficial but definite
change to come. From Ascension onward, many conventional structural elements are
subverted or eradicated altogether. Coltrane’s idea of “the group” was also in a constant state of flux, mainly involving a quintet but by no means limited to that configuration. Ascension involved eleven players, the Meditations suite was performed by a sextet, and Coltrane’s 1967 sessions were often augmented by additional musicians.
Essentially, I am reacting, in this study, to what seems to be injustice and neglect concerning the last works of John Coltrane. While his status as one of the tenor titans is secure, his still-growing reputation spawning new biographies and analysis on a regular basis, attention to his accomplishments is clearly focused on the period 1955-1964. Multiple
reasons inform the neglect of his 1965-1967 work, and these will be outlined below in the context of their representatives’ views.
When Coltrane’s final works are discussed at all, they are treated either in article form or in a book chapter. At the time of this writing, to my knowledge, there are no book- length studies or dissertations on the last two years of John Coltrane’s life and music. The few book chapters and articles that involve discussion of the period treat the music, when at all, from a sociological, journalistic or spiritual perspective. Only composer/performer John Schott’s well-written and thoughtful chapter on chromaticism in Coltrane’s work treats the late works in musical terms, and he is still a lone voice.16 In large part, the earliest efforts were not written by scholars in the traditional sense. Consequently, a fan’s perspective informs many of the first attempts to come to terms with music that is still controversial forty years after the fact. When scholars from several disciplines finally began to address
Coltrane’s music, the last works, especially those following Ascension were generally
16John Schott, “We are Revealing a Hand That Will Reveal Us: Notes on Form and Harmony in Coltrane’s Work”, in Arcana: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books, 2000), pp. 345-366.
ignored; yet, each includes relevant and insightful comments that could be applicable to the period under discussion.
Of the sociological writings on Coltrane’s music, that of Frank Kofsky is still of primary importance. His writings are among the first in which the Amiri Baraka - coined term “New Black Music” is used, and he places Coltrane at the forefront of what he labels a jazz revolution, implying a substantial disconnect from more conventional musical forms.
While Kofsky mentions, repeatedly albeit briefly, the membership of the final Coltrane quintet, he offers no analysis of its music. Any mention of the later music is purely
descriptive, completely forsaking the sociological commentary so prevalent concerning other pieces.17 However, several of his more general comments were among the first to attempt an explanation of how the “new” music was constructed. Of Ascension, he writes:
Such a score, of course, will not be anything like that for a bebop composition;
rather, it may contain a set of general directions — play in a certain register, at a certain volume, in a certain key — together with some cues about when to move from one part of the piece to the next. In Coltrane's composition, Ascension, for example, according to Archie Shepp, "the ensemble passages were based on chords, but these chords were optional. What Trane did was to relate or juxtapose tonally centered ideas, along with melodic and non-melodic elements. In those descending chords there is a definite tonal center, like a B-flat minor, but there are different roads to that center. In the solo-plus-quartet parts, there are no specified chords.
These sections were to be dialogues between the soloists and the rhythm section."18 Such structural ambiguities would inform much of the music to follow over the next two years, from Coltrane’s group and in the New Black Music as a whole. It is to Kofsky’s credit that, unlike many in the critical establishment of the middle 1960s, he is both able and willing to perceive and document such musical concerns. While much of his study concerns
17See the brief passage concerning “My Favorite Things” as recorded at the Village Vanguard in Kofsky, ibid., p. 376. Note that he is descriptive, stating what instruments are heard, but no effort is made to address texture, phrasing or ideological/philosophical motive.
18Kofsky, ibid., p. 315.
critical adversity to the music, Kofsky is clearly listening, his own tenure at Downbeat informing his knowledge of improvised music’s history.
Much more recently, Scott Saul has followed the trails blazed by Kofsky some thirty- five years previously. Chronological distance allows Saul a broader view of Jazz’s influence on 1960s culture, and integral to his vision is what he calls “Black awakening.”19 His
rendering of Coltrane’s music is less militantly revolutionary than Kofsky’s but derived equally from cultural considerations. Unlike Kofsky however, Saul invokes the language of African-American spirituality and infuses it with the drama of 1960s cultural upheaval to create his metaphorical descriptions:
His [Coltrane’s] music testified loudly to his story of conversion, fueling an aesthetics of honesty in extremes, and in this way he pulled jazz away from the ironic hipsterism that infused bebop and much jazz before 1960. Coltrane discovered and refined a style that he imprinted as his own, a style whose authority seemed purchased through the publicly performed anguish of his concerts and recordings. He pursued freedom not for the hell of it, but for the heaven of it—and he did so by creating settings of musical purgatory that forced him to confront his own limits. His classic quartet thrived by inventing and reinventing a thrashing drama of confusion and self- purification, errancy and ultimate reward.20
Such a view of Coltrane’s work must, of course, have A Love Supreme at its fulcrum, and the legendary 1964 album is where Saul ends his analysis. He is no less critical of the critical establishment than is Kofsky, and it is here that we gain some of his valuable insight into the new musical paths Coltrane was following:
His music confronted jazz critics with a considerable dilemma, one that electrified jazz magazines like Down Beat and Metronome in the early to mid- 1960s, as critics fought over labels like "anti-jazz," "free jazz," "action jazz,"
"the new thing," and several others. The crux of the dilemma was this: could Coltrane's music be appreciated in terms inherited from earlier genres (matching
19Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 2003), p.
209.
20Saul, ibid., p. 212.
the elegance of swing, the virtuosity of bebop, the grit of the blues), or did it demand to be measured by a new set of aspirations, in which case jazz critics would have to broaden their vocabulary of judgment and praise, and perhaps even jettison the critical attitude itself?21
Such questions might also be posed to the scholarly community, but the
importance of Saul’s work transcends mere suggestion. He eschews the atheistic socio- politicality of Kofsky to demonstrate the multifarious spiritual concerns of those to whom Coltrane’s music would have had the most appeal. The above quotations are rife with poetic allusions to the myriad struggles associated with Black awakening, bringing Coltrane’s work to life on the page. Even more important, he bridges the gap between the sociopolitical and the spiritual in an overt way that most writers have not achieved.
With the exception of Porter’s 1997 biography, those studies dedicated to the life and works of Coltrane focus on the music in a much more visceral and vaguely spiritual fashion. When present, the sociopolitical issues so prized by Kofsky and Saul inform the method of presentation rather than comprising scholarly endeavor. One might view pioneering Coltrane biographer Dr.Cuthbert Ormond Simkins’ interspersed poetry, for example, as symptomatic of the Black Arts Movement, as represented by the fiery utterances of Amiri Baraka or Jane Cortez. Simkins’ use of dialogue is equally
“authentic,” the book taking on the affect of a novel or character study rather than a biography. The last quintet is represented as a barely cohesive and often directionless unit unable to agree on the precise nature and validity of the experiments Coltrane undertook. Simkins is, however, the first to report the famous “drone” dream of 1957,
21Saul, ibid., p. 225.
to be discussed later, which was to set Coltrane on the path that prefigured and would result in his late works.22 The music itself, however, is not discussed at all.
The same claims can be made for J.C. Thomas’ contemporaneous work; he delves even deeper into a rather mythological précis of Coltrane’s spiritual encounters.
Here though, we get an enticing, if possibly inadvertent, summary of Coltrane’s late style:
The feeling he is receiving is beyond feeling itself; the communication being delivered to him is indescribable. And, awakening from this profound meditation with its paradoxical emphases on exultation and melancholy, he knows that from this moment forward the music he writes will reflect this duality, these contradictions, as his life reflects them every day that he awakens from his short night's sleep.23
Paradox and contradiction, in listener perception, are indeed at the heart of Coltrane’s final works, resulting from temporal disunity. Yet, Thomas does no more than Simkins where actually coming to terms with the music itself is concerned. Both authors rely on the anecdotal to demonstrate loss of audience and group strife, both even implying that Coltrane was unsure of his own direction.
If the late music is discussed at all, it is made so abstract as almost to warrant a modicum of distance and a degree of suspicion. The following quotation from Thomas sums up the complexity of contemporary attitude to Coltrane’s last works:
Gravitational field brings a body or bodies into its orbit that fall into its sphere of influence, as Trane did to people who were similarly inclined. And there are the constantly changing structural values of his music as the notes are emitted from his horn; the effect is like that of light waves pouring out in searing, convoluted streams of pure energy, the matter of the man radiating them like a nuclear reactor. Time, too, was broken up by Trane, stretched and contracted; especially when he was taking a
22 Cuthbert Ormond Simkins, Coltrane: A Biography (New York: Herndon House, 1975; reprinted by Black Classic Press, 1989), p. 87-88
23 J.C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (Garden City, N.Y.: Doublebay and Company, 1975), p. 186.
super long solo. How many people were cognizant of the length of time it took the saxophonist to thoroughly explore each composition, each improvisation? The fact is that the passage of time during the period that people listened to his music was fluid, plastic, and often caught them unaware; some might glance at their watches and say,
"Is it really that late?"24
Endlessly fascinating is the semi-tacit assertion that Coltrane’s music is absolutely scientific on the one hand, and yet it is somehow beyond time, beyond words and outside of the possibility of articulation. The doubleness implied in the statement, while misdirected, bespeaks the very real difficulties, arising from disunity and multileveled narrative that comprises the innovative qualities of Coltrane’s final work.
Geographic doubleness, also a major ingredient of Coltrane’s last works, forms the major component of Bill Cole’s pioneering study. His work is unique for the time, as among the first wave of Coltrane specialists, he is the only one to attempt engagement of the music beyond visceralgia. An extremely active and accomplished musician, dedicating a long career to the New Black Music, he brings an insider perspective to his study of Coltrane’s music. Cole does not shy away from the post-Ascension pieces, even attempting an analysis of the difficult Om:
Om is also his most representative world music piece and it is in Om, a Hindu chanting mechanism, that Trane brings out wooden flutes, bells, a thumb piano, gongs, and cymbals—distinctively a ritual piece done with the utmost reverence. It starts with the thumb piano playing a line of B—A—G—E—D, another pentatonic scale. Then the voices enter, uttering a chant. While this chant is being intoned a wooden flute is played in the background, giving a haunting feeling to the mood. Then the three horns—Sanders and Trane on tenor and Garrett on bass clarinet—begin playing together. Triplets emerge, spinning up and down through the scale. (One should take particular notice of how these lines connect up.) Then, as he always does, Trane comes emerging out of the ensemble playing as though out of the eye of a hurricane; and it is at this point—where all the creative mechanisms that he had learned come into play—
that shapes, sounds, images, and visionary points of view come out of his playing.25
24Thomas, ibid., p. 188.
25Bill Cole, John Coltrane (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), pp. 179-180.
Cole is certainly engaged with the music, and yet his comments often belie a critical rather than a scholarly tendency; there is little objectification in his clearly fan-based analysis, groundbreaking as it is in its inclusivity:
Pharaoh plays an incredible solo, moving into different levels of the horn—sounding like a string instrument at places, moving tremendously fast in tempo and with tremendous strength of articulation. He also takes the audience through different intensities and mood shapes. All the time this is happening, Garrison and Ali are keeping a sound almost like a drone, low in the musical spectrum.26
Phrases such as “intensities” and “mood-shapes” still imply that whatever the music
offers, it is beyond conventional analysis and, therefore, beyond the need for articulation;
while these emotive ingredients do exist in Coltrane’s music, they exist in all music and must eventually be articulated and categorized. Nevertheless, Cole’s work forms an important starting point for analysis in musical terms. It should also be noted that Cole is the first to discuss the fact that Coltrane quotes Meditations in his 1966 performance of Leo, taped in Japan. This observation will be relevant in Chapter 2, during the discussion of self-quotation in Coltrane’s work.
Of those, such as Cole, for whom the music is paramount, none has written of it with the eloquence and precision of Ekkehard Jost. Both a scholar and a player of consummate skill, he provides the earliest scholarly attempt to discuss the New Black Music as music, not as a social or spiritual phenomenon. Of recorded sound, especially relevant to my discussion of transcription below, he writes:
Only a recorded improvisation can be played as often as desired and thus be readily accessible to analysis. Musical impressions gained at concerts or other live performances can contribute only in a supplementary way to perceptions gained by analysis; they may be able to direct analysis toward a certain point, but they can never replace it. Fleeting,
26Cole, ibid., p. 191.
unrepeatable impressions, and distortions caused by the leveling effect of memory, create a haziness regarding musical details that makes any statement about them suspect.27
His analysis of Coltrane’s work, therefore, is based on the released recordings, and while his study ends with Ascension, his rendering of the piece is the most objective of its time. He speaks of the music as sonic complexes, outlining very specifically the foreground and background events that inform the work, both in conducted ensemble passages and in its improvised sections. His analysis is clear and concise, as represented by the following:
In Ascension, the formal disposition into collective improvisations and solos has a second framework superimposed on it, which is a source of structural differentiation, especially during ensemble passages. It consists of systematic changes of modal levels, and occurs with only slight deviations in all eight collective improvisations. The beginning is an Aeolian mode on B flat; a change to D Phrygian is usually coupled with a change of rhythmic structure; the closing sections of the collective blocks are in F Phrygian and lead into the solos that follow; these as a rule begin again in B flat Aeolian. The logic of this structural principle is evident in the tonal material of the modes: F Phrygian and B flat Aeolian contain identical tonal material, and differ only in their point of reference, the fundamental tone of the mode.28
While Jost does not eschew sociopolitical events—his portrait of 1965 New York is unparalleled—his aim is to elucidate the music, and in this, his work is still the yardstick by which all other analysis is measured. Equally notable is his desire to portray both Ascension and Coltrane’s forays into the avant-garde as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
While not specifically following Jost’s lead, Lewis Porter’s biographical contribution, completed in 1997 and still the definitive Coltrane biography to date, engages the music and the artist on a similarly scholarly level. It might best be compared with Alexander Thayer’s definitive biographical study of Beethoven. Like Thayer, Porter attempts, removed as possible from overt fan or disciple mentality, to state the facts of Coltrane’s history in as complete and as objective a manner as befit the materials available to him. Porter does
27Jost, op. cit., p. 14.
28Jost, ibid., p. 85.
include some musical analysis, but it is not to be construed as the sole purpose of his book.
He clearly wishes to maintain a balance, music and biography creating a symbiosis to present as broad yet focused a picture of Coltrane and his epoch as possible. He approaches the music from a performing musician’s perspective, and more than that, an insider perspective where jazz is concerned. While this fact does not guarantee authenticity, it allows for interpretation based on practical knowledge of relevant oral history, performance traditions and verbal rhetoric, all joining to create a picture based in and adherent to traditions
associated with jazz. Beyond that, Porter is a scholar, and his is the first “scholarly” book on Coltrane’s life, engaging the research practices, source studies and overall musicological documentation commensurate with the undertaking. Porter’s book also contains what were then up-to-date discographies and annotated bibliographies, making the book the ground- breaking volume it remains. While Porter does not provide an in-depth analysis of
Coltrane’s final works, his lucid and focused elucidation of “Venus,” recorded in 1967, puts to rest the prevalent view that Coltrane’s faculties were slipping in his final years.
Porter’s biography, as well as Carl Woideck’s Coltrane Companion (Schirmer, 1998) and the newly published Coltrane Reference (Routledge 2007) have made primary source material much more widely available to those interested in studying Coltrane’s music.
Therefore, more journalistic endeavors, such as Valerie Wilmer’s As Serious as your Life and Ashley Khan’s book-length study of A Love Supreme have become important for other reasons than was initially the case. While Wilmer’s study was among the first to document the disintegration of the Classic Quartet and the tensions caused by the late works, no musical discussion is included, and her pioneering work is no longer the primary source document it once was. However, both Wilmer and Khan have made a wider public aware of
the events leading up to his final two years, an enterprise whose value is really beyond estimation.
Much of the primary source material is collected in Carl Woideck’s John Coltrane Companion. Viewed by its author as a companion piece to the Porter volume and resembling
it in comprehensiveness, it collects fifty years of primary sources and organizes them in a way that is useful and engaging. Comprising articles, book chapters, liner notes, interviews and even the occasional survey, the volume is an invaluable source; it contains all of the interviews a beginning Coltrane scholar would need to begin forming a picture of the man, his music and the history that spawned it. As of this writing, it is the only source of its kind, another fact that speaks both to its value and to the infancy of jazz studies. The interview section is particularly complete, gathering almost everything, from a 1997 perspective, that was available of Coltrane in his own words.
While the literature concerning Coltrane offers little in terms of analytical discussion of his final period, it opens many fruitful avenues of inquiry far beyond the scope of this study. This dissertation is by no means definitive, nor do I hope it will be the last word. I wish only to continue the dialogue concerning what I believe to be some of the most important music created in the last fifty years. Yet, somehow, it has received only cursory discussion in the multiple and international improvised music contexts that birthed it and which saw the adoption of its principles.
Beyond the music itself though, an understanding of the social and sociopolitical milieu in which the music formed and flourished is essential to create such a portrait.
At no point in the history of the United States have race, music and politics been more inextricably linked as they were in Black music of the late 1950s and 1960s, one of many
terms that was coined to describe improvised music of which African Americans were the chief innovators (other appellations will be discussed in due course). The music reflected the political aspirations and myriad frustrations of African-Americans determined to procure for themselves the rites and freedoms shared by more privileged US citizens. The interviews that I conducted — see above -- became an integral part of the process of coming to terms with the sociological implications of Coltrane’s late works, allowing me to understand them in multiple contexts and through numerous vastly differing but equally enlightening
perspectives.
Fortunately, many of the participants in 1960s improvised music are still alive, and the many hours I spent speaking with them, both formally and in less formal environments, has fostered a more complete understanding of the often contradictory components at the heart of Coltrane’s music. Most important, and extremely difficult for me to comprehend from my perspective as a Caucasian male, is the contradictory nature of African-American involvement with what I will here oversimplify with the label Western culture. Every conversation and correspondence in which I participated brought home these artists’
engagement with all forms of music, visual art, literature and politics. No matter how young or old, there seemed to be an insatiable urge to maintain perspective on current events and artistic developments and to make their opinions concerning them known in no uncertain terms.
However, any joy that informs these opinions seems to be tempered by anger and suspicion. The need to assert individuality or independence, or both, informs every statement.
I can only conclude that it is symptomatic of long-endured and continuing oppression in the face of progress long-delayed and often insufficient and/or based in empty rhetoric. I now
have a better understanding, to cite only one example, of the reasons behind Charlie Parker’s denial of “classical” influence on bebop while he could quote chapter and verse concerning Bartok and Varèse.29 Conversely, Coltrane’s assertion that the music played by his final group is “classical” music (see Chapter 1) is also illuminated by my interviews with his contemporaries.
On a very intuitive level, this dichotomy informs the music under discussion here.
I have maintained my own suspicions concerning the emotional rhetoric that has dogged discussion of Coltrane’s work, even though his own words, as we will see, encourage such ideas and sentiments. As with contemporaneous reviews of Beethoven symphonies, emotive language supplants analysis, possibly endangering the discussion of becoming
too subjective.30 Yet, it cannot be denied that Coltrane’s music, the final pieces in particular, foster such reactions due to the overwhelming emotional content. They are absolutely suffused with energy, they exude simultaneous celebration and violence, or reflection and urgency. Such considerations may or may not be demonstrable by analysis, and such concerns are beyond the scope of the present study; however, the music’s impact, both positive and negative, is undeniable, and my involvement with its practitioners suggests that the African-American struggle for independence is indeed at the music’s heart, or goes a great distance toward defining its soul. Verbally inarticulate and perhaps ultimately
unspeakable, the meta-narrative, or subtexts, of historical and political events that shaped the 1960s also enabled this music’s striking disunity to occur, and it is with this rather academic but central concern that my study engages. Only Ingrid Monson, in her most recent book,
29For audio documentation of Charlie Parker’s thoughts on Classical music, see http://www.melmartin.com/html_pages/interviews.html (accessed Mar.7, 2008).
30 See Friedrich August Kanne’s 1824 review of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony from David Levy, Beethoven:
The Ninth Symphony (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995), pp.133-4.
Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, has addressed the myriad
implications of race as it concerns 1960s jazz, and her treatment is both comprehensive and illuminating; the chapter entitled “The Debate Within,” Monson is particularly thorough in her presentation of the many difficulties surrounding not only the “jazz” musicians but the club owners and critics as well, all attempting to come to terms with the rapid and
widespread musical and sociopolitical developments in which Coltrane played an integral and patriarchal role.31
It became obvious, during the research process, that not all of the music’s
implications could be explored in the scope afforded by a dissertation. I have chosen, in that light, to limit my analysis to the music itself. In dealing with this period of Coltrane, I am dealing, as has been stated above, with recorded sound. Simply and perhaps obviously put, the recordings are the primary documentation of Coltrane’s music of 1965-1967, as it is with most “free” jazz. I hope that it is equally obvious that I do not mean to imply any lack of compositional procedures. The conventional notion of free improvisation seems to involve
“making it up as you go along,” but such a notion is severely limiting regarding the
composers’ conception and execution of their respective compositions. It is only necessary to determine what those procedures might be, so far as is ever possible, by using means other than conventional score analysis. Equally important is the fact that in many instances of late Coltrane, where meter and pitch disappear, conventional notation simply cannot represent or replace the sound of the music itself.
The fact that improvised music is documented most completely in recorded media switches the interpretative angle from the static to the transient. In a written score, intention
31Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), see especially “The Debate Within,” p.238.
can be deduced from the page, a fixed form, and while the music is certainly malleable in performance, the parameters in play must be derived, in large part, from the score.32 In Western art music from the Renaissance until the middle 20th century, improvisation, no matter how prevalent, remains in the service of the music as written symbol. Improvised music is just what the title implies, and therefore, execution is of primary importance. The fact that recordings exist paves the way for different interpretative concerns; for our purposes, style and phrasing are among the most important. The differentiations between players’ so- called “sound” is not necessarily capturable in standard notation. If vibrato, thickness of tone and decay are converted to symbols, they are still only substitutes for the primary document, in this case the recording. Even a conventionally tuned solo instrument, such as a piano, is capable of achieving many simultaneous rhythmic layers and vastly differing attacks, and these are better conveyed to the student or scholar in original form, especially when the sound as a whole is the subject of discussion.
Because the music under discussion is documented in this way, I have elected to use sound examples where conventional notation is not appropriate and traditional transcription in those circumstances where it supports my hearing of the music. Coltrane’s solos, for example, still rely mainly on material that exists in the domain of conventional pitch. Unlike Pharaoh Sanders, he does not resort to the hugely emotive but ultimately un-notatable moans and shrieks so prevalent in the 1960s “free jazz” saxophone repertoire. Given that Coltrane does not eschew pitch, notation is a fairly simple procedure, account only needing to be taken of the spaces between atomistic phrases so important to his soloistic language.
32I am, of course, leaving aside early Western musics for which the score, all that remains, was probably a road map to many improvised practices that are only now being reconstructed.
His use of the standard rhythm section, especially in the final two years of his career, is a different matter. While individual components can be notated, with varying degrees of success dependent on their complexity, the aggregate sound defies any conventional notation.
Essentially, it is this sound that forms one level of my bipartite hearing of Coltrane’s final works, and each component of that level’s relationship to any other is open to debate from moment to moment. To illustrate these aggregates, or what Ekkehard Jost insightfully labels sound complexes, fragments of the recordings themselves seem the only truly satisfactory method of conveyance. With the advent of readily accessible digital recording and playback technologies on every computer, not to mention the recently adopted procedure of online dissertation submission, such a solution seems all the more viable. It allows the music to be heard in its primary form, not glimpsed in a serialized bare-bones and, most importantly, visual approximation, and it is to be hoped that my descriptive prose will elucidate the salient points in what is undoubtedly difficult but extremely important music that was meant, above all, to be heard.
To that end, I have divided my discussion of Coltrane’s music along different lines than have previous analysts. The theoretical groundwork for my approach is laid in the first chapter, quotations from Kramer and Parker used to support my claims of disunity along the lines of temporal perception. The rest of Chapter 1 consists of quotations from Coltrane himself regarding time, rhythm, temporal expansion and the conjoined roles of magic and spirituality in his music. Chapters 2 and 3 address, separately, Coltrane’s soloing and the novel way in which he deploys rhythm section respectively. In the second chapter,
Coltrane’s solos are analyzed for the atomistic tendencies that increased in his final period.
Chapter 3 comprises an examination of the way in which conventionally “swung” rhythms,
or dotted eighth-note rhythms, gradually disappeared from Coltrane’s compositional aesthetic to be replaced by structures that thrive on verticality, even approaching minimalism. In the final chapter, two different case studies are presented to demonstrate the ways in which two succeeding generations of musicians come to terms with Coltrane’s compositional legacy, especially concerning the work from 1965-1967. These case studies encompass the intersections of “jazz” and “classical” music and blur the boundaries between these superficially distinct genres.
CHAPTER 1 ANTECEDENTS
Introduction
Any analytical model employed to analyze Coltrane’s final work must take into account the music’s fundamental split from conventional jazz structure; it is the aim of this chapter to provide and detail such a model. Following a presentation of the model
I have employed to elucidate these works, Coltrane’s own words, few as they are and vague as they can be, will be examined as they relate to the path I have chosen through his final period.
Before such an examination can occur and my bipartite model be presented, a few general observations about the evolution of improvised music toward the freedom of the 1960s are in order. As stated in my introduction, the fundamental problem with scholarship concerning Coltrane’s final works, and with scholarship concerning free jazz more generally, is that the music is analyzed along the formal lines of more traditional jazz. Regarding creative Black music up to the time of Ornette Coleman, the concepts of melody, harmony and rhythm governed the way a piece of music was constructed and the “feel” of the piece.
A large component of that ambiguous but ever-present phenomenon we label “feel” is the way events are divided in time, whether it be the passage of rhythmic cycles or the
melodic/harmonic form of the music. Up to 1962, admittedly an oversimplification but applicable, jazz improvisation relied on repeated rhythmic cycles, exemplified most
completely by the drummer’s role as timekeeper in the service of various conceptions of melody and harmony. Even in the mainly undocumented early stages of bebop, when a pre- existing set of chord changes was stripped of its melody and given a new one, the structural language followed similar lines. However, rhythm, as manifest through the passage of time and the “freeing” of drummers from metronomic slavery, became as determinate a factor as melody in the structure of a tune. True, the swing aesthetic was still present in the swung rhythms heard in the drummer’s ride cymbal patterns, but the syncopations were sublimated in favor of strong accents on beats two and four, creating more of a simple duple feel that supplanted the swung rhythmic complexity of much 1930s music. Such a feel still kept a continuous sense of the even passage of time firmly in the listener’s grasp while elucidating certain moments of burgeoning temporal disunity. Increased tempo became the catalyst leading to the transformation, the process being laid bare in the jam sessions waxed privately during the recording ban of 1942-44.33
While each epoch in jazz history sports its retrogressions, the 1950s were, as Orrin Keepnews claims with understated insight, a period of transition.34 Melodies continued to become more disjunct, also being divorced from whatever harmony was occurring while the melody was stated. The end of swing corresponded with the end of the decade, as mavericks like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman began, at first in private, to examine more loosely defined rhythmic structures and, consequently, increased temporal freedom; these
innovations will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3. Traditional western European art music became less and less overtly relevant as new forms and musical languages were
33A detailed discussion of the American Federation of Musicians’ recording ban of 1942-44, and its precursors and implications, is available at http://www.swingmusic.net/Big_Band_Era_Recording_Ban_Of_1942.html (Accessed March 21, 2008)
34Orrin Keepnews, phone interview conducted by Marc Medwin, May 25, 2007.
realized, Ornette Coleman finally stating that he had devised a music independent of
European influence.35 Whether or not his assessment was accurate, the impulse is extremely important in defining the music that would follow during the next six to seven years.
Western European classical music’s practitioners had already been obsessed with such temporal concerns for years, the most ubiquitous examples involving Stockhausen’s
“moment form” and Boulez’s temporally conflated cycles in Le Marteau sans Maître, both seeing advent in the middle 1950s. The improvised music of the 1960s brought about a similar seachange in the increasing number of approaches to time in music and its perception.
After Taylor, Coleman and the early orchestral compositions of Bill Dixon, melody and harmony lost much of their revered meanings, new traditions usurping old as jazz faced the inexorability of its own history. The hybrid structures of 1940s innovators such as George Handy, still all but unrecognized in the written histories of creative music, bore rapid and plentiful fruit. I am not referring to what is called Third Stream in so many jazz courses and texts, that failed approach hopelessly indebted to Western European classical music. I am not even positing that Coleman, Taylor, Dixon and the other revolutionaries simply tapped into the classical repertoire for inspiration; their developments paralleled innovations in formal concert music, as will be shown in Chapter 3, but to paint their accomplishments solely in that light negates the aims and roots of the music that emerged. Their work is ultimately an innovative product born of race-based exclusion from the elite of American composition, musical education and organizations.36 The path they forged is multifarious, requiring a new mode of analysis as well as new modes of sociopolitical discourse.
35See Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1998), p.217.
Evan Parker, Jonathan Kramer, Time and the Atomism/Laminarity Dichotomy
We have already seen that by 1965, American free jazz had penetrated deeply into Europe’s improvisational psyche, and that despite statements to the contrary, a reciprocal process was in play in the United States. Therefore, my analytical model involves two modes of musical perception, one drawn from the realm of Western-European classical music and one born of the tradition of 1960s improvised music. Both Evan Parker’s
intellectualization of atomism versus laminarity in improvised music and Jonathan Kramer’s theories of temporal perception in classical music are based on phenomena associated with listening. More importantly, the former is equivalent to Kramer’s elucidations of multiply- directed linear time and vertical time, the bird’s nest of terminology to be untangled in due course. Parker’s and Kramer’s constructs are complementary in that they express trans- cultural opposites which, I will posit, blend in the final music of John Coltrane to create an innovative two-level narrative form. Such a construction will allow this admittedly difficult and certainly underdiscussed music to be heard in a way that does not chain it too tightly either to jazz or European classical analysis traditions. Yet, neither theoretician’s construct accounts directly for Coltrane’s final works, even though both articulate what I believe to be its core components and implications.
If John Coltrane has an equally famous European counterpart, it is British
saxophonist Evan Parker. Very few European improvisers have had the continued world-
36Most of the African-American musicians of the 1960s to whom I have spoken have a story about denial—not being allowed at a certain school, not being auditioned for orchestras under the same terms as white colleagues, etc. Their bitterness is palpable forty years later. Art Davis, one of Coltrane’s favored bassists, went to his grave embittered about the way the New York Philharmonic had treated him in 1968-69. A detailed discussion of his failed discrimination suit against the New York Philharmonic can be found in Ortiz Walton, Music: Black, White and Blue, a Sociological Survey of the Use and Misuse of Afro-American Music (William Morrow &
Company, 1972), pp. 124-135.